From the Mystery Lovers Book of Quotations

Liberal principles are all very fine as long as they leave you with something to have principles about. -- Jack Higgins

Sweep everything under the rug for long enough, and you have to move right out of the house. -- Rachel Ingalls

It's hard to live a reputation down. Especially when your actions live up to it. -- Michael Z. Lewin

A prompt man is a lonely man. - Elmore Leonard

You know who casts the first stone? The guiltiest bastard in the crowd. -- William McIlvanney

Life is the process of finding out, too late, everything that should have been obvious to you at the time. -- John D. MacDonald, "The Only Girl in the Game"

We gave her everything. But it wasn't what she wanted. -- Ross MacDonald, "The Underground Man"

Sanity is sometimes a matter of going on, outwardly, as if everything is all right. -- Mary McMullen, "Prudence Be Damned"

People without brains are always dangerous. -- A.E.W. Mason, "The House of the Arrow"

Everybody needs a little improbability in their life. -- Reginal Hill, "Deadheads"

Read This

I want to say it gently but I want to say it firmly, there is a tendency for the world to say to America the big problems of the world are yours, you go and sort them out, and then to worry when America wants to sort them out. -- Tony Blair

"How about you?" asked Christopher. "Are you happy?"
"Yes. More than happy. Content."
"Perhaps that's the secret."
"Contentment?"
"Yes. Instead of asking, 'Are you happy?', perhaps what people should really ask is, 'Are you content?'"
"Isn't that like resignation? Like giving in?"
"I don't think so. I think it's about getting in touch with reality. About balancing aspirations and actuality."
--Alan Titchmarsh, "Love and Devon"

Favorite Author Quote from Martha Grimes:"It's just like family, her people. It's the kind of thing these new writers don't understand, that readers want to feel this is a family they can walk and talk amongst. Writers these days only want to write about breakups and breakdowns, everything unraveling and everybody going to the devil."

In which we ponder getting wee-wee'd up over Woodstock

I was born too late to appreciate Woodstock. Thank God. And thanks to loving, sane adult parenting, by the time I heard of Woodstock when I was in my teens, I thought, "Yuck," or something like that. I can't actually remember what I would have said, but I do know there was never a moment when the abandonment of self-control and the embracing of self-destruction and anarchy that was Woodstock did not repel me.

And this one, noting that the brainless Woodstock worshippers are today's authoritarians.

"The self-delusion of liberalism is bottomless. It blithely celebrates the inane though no less destructive nihilism of Woodstock while treating as nihilistic traitors serious, property-holding, taxpaying citizens who protest a statist takeover of one-sixth of the United States economy.

Beneath the well-pressed suits of those establishment liberals who are now touting the virtues of "civility" lies the sordid attire of Woodstock, illustrating once again that no one is more authoritarian than a successful left-wing protester. And as the agents of previous liberal revolutions understood acutely, the Woodstock authoritarians know that they must cow vigilant citizens into docility, for the most sweeping revolutions are not carried out against state power but with it."

***

Here's the verbalization of something long observed: the UPCHUCK FACTOR.

"The Upchuck Factor is, quite simply, the length of time it takes the US voter to decide that s/he's "had enough" of the Democrats. And it looks like this year it is hitting a new record.

You may have been taught in school, for instance, that the American people loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt so much that they would have gone on voting for him forever. In fact the American people demonstrated in the mid-term election of 1938 that they were ready to upchuck him and all his works. The 1938 elections featured an 81-seat gain in the House of Representatives for the Republicans. Figure that FDR's Upchuck Factor was 6.

What was the problem in 1938? It wasn't that complicated. After six years of political bombast and war on the private sector -- and after FDR gunned the economy into the red zone in 1936 with unprecedented stimulus -- the economy collapsed in 1937 and the American people decided that they had had enough. They determined to upchuck the New York machine politics of FDR. But then along came World War II and saved his political skin.

The 1960s is another era in which we are taught that Americans loved their government. They basked in the sun of JFK and LBJ, and loved the exciting space programs and wars on poverty. But in fact, the American people decided they had had enough after six years of it. In 1966, well before the Summer of Love, American voters upchucked and gave the Republicans 47 additional seats in the House. Two years later they sent the very un-sunny Richard Nixon to the White House. Give the JFK/LBJ Democrats an Upchuck Factor of 6.

In the late 1970s President Jimmy Carter came into office promising that he'd never lie to the American people. Maybe he didn't, but he wrecked the economy and this time the American people didn't wait six or eight years before upchucking.

It was then that the voters' digestion really started to go south. They vomited up Carter and the Democrats after four years in 1980 and elected a man that "everyone" agreed was little more than an amiable dunce. Things must have been really bad for the American people to go to that extreme. President Carter moved the Upchuck Factor to 4."

Okay, I'm really late in reading these. And yet, I'm in plenty of time, as those well-dressed establishment liberals--those wealthy folks who shed crocodile tears over the plight of the poor, those "ecology-minded" criers of "global warming" while living in houses that drain more energy in a month than most of us do in a year--are still in power and doing all they can to cow the rest of us. And those conferences they fly to where they talk about "climate change"...haven't they heard of teleconferences? Or even video-conferencing?

And they aren't just in Washington; they've been washing the brains of university students for more than 30 years. I hope the upchuck factor works really fast, with conservatives gaining control of both Houses of Congress next year--and then not wimping out when the Liberals bark.

Thinking of Breeding Your Pet?

The Harp Is a Beautiful Instrument of Torture

Favorite Quotes

The self-delusion of liberalism is bottomless. It blithely celebrates the inane though no less destructive nihilism of Woodstock while treating as nihilistic traitors serious, property-holding, taxpaying citizens who protest a statist takeover of one-sixth of the United States economy. - George Neumayr

You can tell the Democrats are in trouble when a naïve hockey mom from Alaska can appear out of nowhere and wrestle the entire Democratic Party to the ground. - Christopher Chantrill

...Western hand-wringers, the great progressive liberals of the Western world, would rather wring their hands, or like Darfur, hold some ... interpretive dance event to save Darfur every week for the next thirty years. The uselessness of liberal outrage is one of the great constants of the modern world. --Mark Steyn

"America, not Europe, is now the sanctuary of culture; civilization's very existence depends upon America, upon the actuality of American life, and not the ideals of the American Dream. To criticize the actuality upon which all hope depends thus becomes a criticism of hope itself." -- Delmore Schwartz, 1958

"I've got nothing to do and I'm doing it tomorrow." --Elaine Stritch

"...He is, like all great funny men, inconsolable." --John Lahr describing a famous comedian

In taking our self-examining ethos to these extremes, we have lost a kind of wisdom, wisdom that acknowledges the complexity of human life but can move through it to find the simple truth again. While assessing the intricate failings of our moral history, many of us have lost sight of the simple truth that the system that shapes us is, in fact, a great one, that it has moved us inexorably to do better and that it's well worth defending against every aggressor and certainly against as shabby and vicious an aggressor as we face today. -- Andrew Klavan

The elites in Washington, D.C., New York City and the United Nations seem to have plotted a journey to lead America into the New World Order where a cosmopolitan global citizen is no more connected to his country than a sociopath to his fellow man. -- Dimitri Vassilaros

"Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark." --Cpl. Jeffrey B. Starr, 1983-2005

Anything that doesn’t show Americans as stupid, selfish, warmongering, religious bigots, half of them living in pampered luxury in garish purpose-built Italianate mansions, the other half downtrodden in the ghetto by Halliburton stock-owning fat-cats, isn’t going to make it to the front pages or the Ten O’Clock News. --Gerard Baker

In Their Own Words: Democrats on W.M.D.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., December 1998: "Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."

Robert Einhorn, Clinton assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, March 2002: "How close is the peril of Iraqi WMD? Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors (albeit attacks that would be ragged, inaccurate and limited in size). Within four or five years it could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing fissile material produced indigenously -- and to threaten U.S. territory with such weapons delivered by nonconventional means, such as commercial shipping containers. If it managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much sooner."

Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, February 1998: "He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has 10 times since 1983."

...without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again... [It's} hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country’s salvation.--New York Times Editorial Board

Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.
Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.--Ted Kennedy & Robert Byrd in 2002

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force—if necessary—to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.--John Kerry in 2002

Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.--Al Gore in 2002

We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.--Al Gore in 2002

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.--Sen. Hillary Clinton

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.--Nancy Pelosi